Watch: Baby Born in China Earthquake Zone

In a week full of bad news, China’s Sichuan TV provides a refreshingly uplifting story with this raw footage of a baby being born amid the rubble of Saturday’s deadly earthquake in Lushan county:

According to the semi-official China News Service, the baby was born in a tent outside People’s Hospital in the city of Ya’an roughly at around 9 a.m., just an hour after a magnitude 7.0 quake shook the area. Hospital staff had just finished evacuating the baby’s mother, Cao Miao, to an empty stretch of ground outside the hospital when she pointed to her belly and shouted to the nurses that she was about to give birth.

Advertisement

Nurses carried to her a covered parking area where evacuated patients were lying on mobile beds. The patients then squeezed together to make space for the soon-to-be mother. Roughly a half an hour later, out came a healthy 8-lb. 3-oz. baby girl.

Ms. Cao had been in the hospital since April 10 and was long overdue, according to CNS. She is reportedly considering naming her new daughter Zhensheng, or Quake-Born.

News of the girl’s birth lit up a Chinese Internet that had been consumed with the tragedy of the quake. “Birth, hope,” wrote one user of the Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service, neatly summarizing a sentiment expressed across the site.

About China Real Time Report

China Real Time Report is a vital resource for an expanding global community trying to keep up with a country changing minute by minute. The site offers quick insight and sharp analysis from the wide network of Dow Jones reporters across Greater China, including Dow Jones Newswires’ specialists and The Wall Street Journal’s award-winning team. It also draws on the insights of commentators close to the hot topic of the day in law, policy, economics and culture. Its editors can be reached at chinarealtime@wsj.com.